The Legal Breach. The Corrosion of Citizenship and the Decline of Public Spaces

Abstract

This article focuses on a problematic that we have called “uncitizenshipness” of socially marginal
sectors. The social gap translates into a spacial gap, but also into a legal gap. In societies with an
unequal social structure, state’s controls are ambivalent, when social polarizations translate into spacial
segregations. The state puts forward different legal statuses in function of the capacity of consumption
that represents each social category. The objetctive of this essay is to explore the institutional processes
of criminialization through which entire sectors of the population are hindered and incapacitated, in order
to prevent them from excersising their rights, producing a devaluated citenzenship, that demonices them,
as well as it invisibilices and diminishes democratic play